Workplace from Facebook has outlined three main objectives for 2021 that centre on productivity and wellbeing, Ujjwal Singh, head of product, has told UC Today.
Specifically, the three targets are:
- Increasing who can take part in company-wide dialogue, with a particular focus on frontline workers who often miss out
- Increasing productivity within Workplace from Facebook, rather than having the platform seen as being predominately focused on chat
- Leveraging asynchronous communication
(More on these points later.)
Workplace from Facebook started as an internal tool at Facebook and was officially launched to outside businesses in 2016.
Paid users had reached five million by March 2020 – an increase of over two million from October 2019. Like many other platforms, it has also seen a surge in demand during the pandemic.
High-profile announcements last year saw BT roll out the service to 80,000 employees, while a tie-up with Cisco Webex created a buzz in the UC industry.
Singh says that the success of Workplace is largely driven by its familiarity.
The platform works in much the same way as the consumer Facebook, as do features like posts, comments and likes.
But some elements have been transitioned over and tweaked for a business audience.
Features such as Live have been enhanced to let CEOs broadcast to whole businesses at the click of a button, for example. A recent update means that Live can have multiple hosts at the same time and field questions from viewers.
The Safety Check function - often used during natural disasters so people can let their loved ones know they’re safe – has been added to Workplace as Safety Centre, with a range of COVID-related functionality such local lockdown guidance and announcements on office closures.
Huge parts of Workplace from Facebook are brought in from the consumer platform, but Singh said it's important the enterprise platform is more tailored.
“We do have people who use consumer Facebook for work purposes, and we don’t discourage that, but we have companies that have stricter requirements around data separation, identity and those sorts of things," he said.
“That’s partly why Workplace exists; we take the best features that work in consumer and we give them to businesses in a safe way that is more powerful for them"
“The data isn’t mixing, there aren’t any ads – it’s things like that that we keep separate.
“So we have frontline workers using Facebook Groups for things like shift management but that’s an ad-hoc usage of the consumer tools.
“We think we can do a much better job inside Workplace in terms of enabling functionality in a much safer and more direct way.”
It is the focus on frontline workers that makes up the first objective for Workplace this year.
Singh said that many of these workers are inadvertently out of the loop when it comes to company-wide announcement and interactions, in many cases not even having an email address.
Having the Workplace app can help stop these employees feeling isolated, he explained.
Features such as Live have already gone some way to addressing this issue and Singh said we can expect to see more investment in this area this year.
“We’re going to lean more heavily into that,” he said.
“That’s a big area of investment for us in 2021 and we’re going to continue building that out.
“Anyone in a company that has Workplace can post and we’re going to be focused on expanding that to the frontline.”
Increased productivity
Perhaps the most significant of Singh’s three objectives is the aim to increase the amount of work users can carry out from inside the Workplace platform.
